The St. Louis Blues continue to tease their fans in 2018-19. Their win over Washington showed people what they are capable of again.
Maybe we will never know what is truly wrong with the St. Louis Blues in 2018-19. On paper, this should be an excellent team that is right in the middle of the playoff picture. Instead, they have been insanely inconsistent and sometimes awful.
However, against Washington, we saw what this team is capable of and what we all expected to see throughout the season. For whatever reason, they cannot find a way to sustain this sort of play.
Scoring first seems to really be a huge key for this team. They now have 13 wins when scoring first and are 10 games under .500 when not. So, getting the first goal in this game was supremely important to defeating the defending champions.
Making matters better was the fact Robert Thomas got the goal. He is moving up the roster and getting involved in important ways, including getting in front of the net for deflections and rebounds.
The Blues did get the crowd out of it by allowing two unanswered Washington goals. But, instead of letting that crush their spirit, they did something we have rarely seen this season – they battled back.
A power play goal, which have been lacking, tied the game. A great, diving effort play took the lead and then the captain managed to give them some insurance.
There is no need to think this result will carry over to the future. But, it continues to show what this team could be, even if they never find a way to duplicate it.
Pros: Oskar Sundqvist
Oskar Sundqvist is the perfect example of a guy that grabbed the proverbial brass ring no matter how many people questioned why he was even getting the chances.
Based on his limited experiences in the NHL prior to this season, nobody understood why the Blues kept giving him chances. Most of us were forced to assume it was due to his involvement in a trade of a popular player.
Fans all over, including myself, kept saying they had to bench him for more talented players. He’s shoved that back in all our faces.
Sundqvist now has seven goals on the season after scoring a huge goal for the team, that ended up being the game winner. It was a big effort play, where he dove after the rebound and backhanded it in.
The amazing thing is how he’s done it. All seven goals are at even strength since he gets almost no power play time.
Even more interesting is that he has more goals than guys like Steen, Schwartz and Bozak and is tied with Brayden Schenn.
The timing of the goal was big too. The Blues were finally getting sustained pressure following their go-ahead goal. They kept up the intensity instead of allowing Washington to reclaim it and Sundqvist was rewarded by being in the right spot at the right time to slip one in.
It was not just a luck goal either. He had to have the body awareness to keep his stick in position and sweep it in the right direction instead of back into the goaltender. Given the angle of it all, it was quite impressive.
Cons: Power Play
This is becoming a reoccurring theme, but the power play is just dreadful right now. The Blues’ man-advantage is an encapsulation of how their season has gone. They are feast or famine, all or less than nothing.
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Sure, they tied the game up on a power play, but it took half the game to get that unit to even look respectable. Prior to that goal, it was all a shambles.
I put it on Twitter and stand by the statement. Only the St. Louis Blues could get outshot and outchanced on their own power play.
St. Louis had two consecutive power plays, one of which was four minutes long. Washington may as well have had the man advantage for all the odd-man rushes St. Louis gave up.
Thankfully the Blues got good goaltending because they needed it.
It just makes no sense how this team can look so good if/when they get it into the zone but struggle so much otherwise. There are times, mostly due to predictability, they cannot even enter the zone. On Star Wars night, it was as if the Capitals were using the Force to keep the puck away from their defensive zone.
Statistically, 1-4 is not terrible and most teams will take a 25% score rate. It is just how bad things go on the ones they do not score one. If you do not score that is one thing, but to constantly be under siege with shorthanded chances against is ridiculous.
Pros: Jake Allen
Haters continue to hate, but Jake Allen is a huge reason the Blues won this game. There are no conditions to that statement, it is just true.
Allen was not invincible, by any means. The first goal given up, in a perfect world, you’d like his blocker to be a little quicker even if he’s going up against a world-class scorer.
The second goal was a bigger blunder. Fans fail to realize that with the stiffness of today’s pads, goalies often don’t have a clue where the rebound goes. That said, Allen simply cannot allow that rebound to come out or at least realize where it went and dive out.
However, given how the team played, Allen bailed them out on numerous occasions.
He had to stop five shorthanded shots by Washington. The Capitals, who have one of the better power plays in the NHL, only managed three shots with the power play.
There is something supremely wrong with giving up more chances on your power play than your opponent’s power play, but Allen came up big. He even stopped some breakaways, which have given him fits of late.
Credit has to go to the Blues defense as well, since they only allowed two third period shots and those did not come until late. However, it was Allen’s timely stops that kept the Blues in the game. Even when down 2-1, it was some of those saves that allowed the Blues to have an opportunity to come back and that’s what you need from your goalie.
Cons: The Penalties
I do not care that the Blues managed to kill off all three Washington power plays or that they limited them to three shots. I’m tired of how this team takes penalties.
We all hate when they are shorthanded and get on the referees, but this team takes more dumb penalties than anyone in recent memory. They are not even effort penalties most times, which is even more infuriating.
For the second game in a row, they took a penalty in the first minute of play. You cannot do that. You just cannot put your special teams unit on the ice that early in the game before you even have a chance to get into the flow of the contest.
The offensive zone penalties have got to stop too. I saw so many people talking about what a weak call it was against David Perron, and it was. But he’s known for that stuff and refs are watching. There is absolutely no need to hook someone in the offensive zone when there is 0.1% chance of getting the puck from it.
Chances are high you will get called. Even if you are not, you still give the opponent something to gripe about and the officials something to watch for later in the game.
I love Perron, but he is good for goals and offensive zone penalties and little else right now. The latter is erasing much of the good will built up by the former.
Overview
As mentioned above, there is absolutely no reason to think this result carries any weight beyond tonight. We have seen it far too much where the Blues lay an egg immediately after a big win.
So, let us just enjoy this result and hope for the best. It likely will not come since the Blues are coming off a big win and playing on a Saturday, which the Blues have been terrible on.
But, as mentioned also, they continue to tease us. Even if they did not get the result every night, if this was the Blues team we saw every night, most fans would be ok with that. At worst, you’d be a game or two above .500 and still talking about playoff chances.
Instead, we are all forced to make snide comments and sarcastic remarks on social media as a self-defense mechanism. None of us want the Blues to lose, but we cannot assume they will have more nights like this one either.
Clearly, they are talented enough to beat anyone in the league even without everything going right for them. Their star player was out sick and they actually banded together and pulled off a big win. If only we could believe they might do it the rest of the season.